The Power Of Pedro

Martinez already has two Cy Young Awards (the National League's, in 1997 with the Montreal Expos, and the American League's last year), and he doesn't turn 29 until October. He put up more impressive figures in '99 than a Miss America pageant. He went 23-4 with a 2.07 ERA, won the pitching triple crown (wins, ERA and strikeouts), set a major league record with 13.2 strikeouts per nine innings, did not allow a home run in any of the 293 at bats against him with a runner on, permitted only three leadoff walks to score (he walked the first batter only six times in 213? innings) and struck out 37% of all batters he faced. That was not enough.

"Every day in Boston somebody will tell me, 'My father—or grandfather—wants to see the Red Sox win the World Series, just once. You are the one who can do it,' " Martinez says. "I tell them I will try, but I cannot do it by myself. It takes a team, and I think the team we have now is as good as any in the big leagues."

Martinez climbs the crude, cratered mound on one of Centro Ol�mpico's diamonds. He peers into the plate and smiles knowingly, even wickedly. He has no ball or glove. But even so, even here, as you watch him on that mound, you sense what it must feel like to know you can play tic-tac-toe with a baseball at 20 paces without ever using the center square...this is what it feels like to hold 5.19 ounces of absolute superiority in your hands...this is what it feels like to be El Duro.

"The plate," he says. "It looks so close. There are days when I first get out to the mound and it feels just like this, like the plate is closer than it's supposed to be. Then I know right away. It's over. You are f——-. F——-."

At that moment you can feel his fire, wavelets of passion and supreme confidence radiating from him. "I am a pitcher because I like the challenge of being responsible for the game, of being in charge of the action," Martinez says. "If the shortstop makes an error, I am responsible. I let the batter hit the ball."

Yes, standing in the wake of his fire, you understand perfectly that this is a man who can use a baseball to snip the button from a hitter's shirt, who is the last great hope of geriatric New Engenders and who sent the Cleveland Indians home for the winter, despite an injured arm he could barely lift above his head and with little more of his usual weaponry than the look of a lion tamer in his eyes.

This also is a man who wears jeans with Linus embroidered on the back pocket. A man who prepares for his starts by tending to flowers in his garden. A man who melts around children. A man who gave his entire $6,500 signing bonus in 1988 to his big brother, Ramon. A man who has built a church and three houses—with an elementary school, a playground, a ball field and more houses to come—for the impoverished people of Manoguayabo, his hometown in the Dominican.

This is also a man who, as a skinny boy, loved to climb the old mango tree in his backyard. Alone, the boy would study his school lessons high in the branches. Sometimes while in that tree he would remember his parents' yelling and screaming in his house and how it could still make him cry years later. He would explain it many times to many physicians and psychiatrists in many hospitals in Santo Domingo. They found a heart murmur in the boy but could do nothing for the sadness he kept inside. He was six years old during the worst of it. Too young to understand but too old to forget. When would the tears stop?

Yes, all that is part of the fire, too. That, too, is El Duro.

The doctors examined the strained .muscle running from his right shoulder down his back and said Martinez might be able to throw 40 pitches, absolute max. Jimy Williams, the Boston manager, decided that if the Red Sox were tied or had a small lead in the eighth inning, Martinez would pitch that inning and, the good Lord willing, the ninth too. If Boston could beat Cleveland at Jacobs Field in Game 5 of the 1999 Division Series, it would play the New York Yankees for a spot in the World Series. If the Red Sox lost, they went home.